GIS • Mapping • Raspberry Pi • Photography

I recently upgraded my Raspberry Pi 256mb from Raspbmc to the OSMC Release Candidate, there were a few hiccups along the way so thought I’d document them here incase anyone else runs into the same issues.

The OSMC RC install went fairly smoothly. I say fairly because it took a few attempts and some digging around before I found out I needed to add gpu_mem=32 to boot.config to prevent the install from hanging on my Raspberry Pi B 256mb.

Once OSMC was installed I then installed Hyperion in the usual way: install prerequisites, download installer, run installer:

I recently took part in Bath:Hacked 2.1, a hackathon where 50 ish people were locked* in a room for 36 hours with a bunch of open data and asked to produce something useful or interesting to the people of Bath.

This was actually my second Bath:Hacked event, the first resulted in this: http://nadnerb.co.uk/bathhacked/ – an interactive map displaying rates of recycling in Bath and North East Somerset.

At the 2.1 event my team created BathAlerts – an email alert service which keeps you informed of any planning applications, crimes or house sales in your local area. It will even send you an instant email alert should the Environment Agency issue a flood alert in your local area. You can try out the service here: bathalerts.bathhacked.org and read more about it here.

It was a great 2 days, I learnt a lot particularly the backend side of things and using GitHub to work on a coding project as part of a team.
One of the more difficult parts of the event was actually deciding on an idea. I think we spent the first 3 hours brainstorming and came up with about 4-5 ideas before settling on BathAlerts.

Feeling inspired after Bath:Hacked I decided to follow up on one of these shortlisted ideas – using the historical mapping datasets recently added to the datastore to explore Bath’s past.

I wanted to produce something from scratch and finally get to grips with CSS to produce a nice responsive design.
The result is HistoryMap – a web app that allows you to easily explore and compare 8 historical maps ranging from the 1500’s to the 1940’s.

I’m pretty happy with the results, it works well on mobiles, tablets and laptops – each with a slightly different design and functionality.
For best performance though I would recommend Chrome on a desktop/laptop.

I hope to add more relevant datasets and maps as and when I find them, as well as extend coverage to other areas.

And finally, a big thanks to everyone at Bath:Hacked for sourcing the data, especially Leigh Dodds for doing the hard work of georeferencing all the maps!

After putting together my DIY GoPro grip I’ve been thinking up more DIY mounts to add to my growing collection of GoPro mounts! Here’s two of my latest additions.

First up we have a pole, similar to a GoPole Reach… but without the extra reach.
It was a very straightforward build:

Get some PVC pipe that’s 22mm in diameter

Cut to size

Add a mountain bike handlebar grip to one end

Add a GoPro handbar mount to the other end

For a more detailed look, plus some extra ideas, I’ve put together a quick how to video here:

The second DIY project is a modification of the popular Ikea egg timer timelapse mount.
Sitting this thing on the ground with a mount and camera on top can be a bit unstable, especially in the wind. The solution is a mini tripod.
To mount the timer on the tripod I drilled a 6mm hole in the bottom of the timer using a Dremel (no need to take the timer apart). I then tested the hole with the tripod screw, it was slightly too small so I used a sanding tool to carefully enlarge the hole. It may take a few attempts of sanding but once the screw starts to ‘take’ it will thread the metal and the plastic underneath giving you a secure fit. No need for screw tap sets!

Obviously this mini tripod can be removed and the timer can be placed on a full sized tripod or any device with a male tripod attachment.

Last month I entered my GPS running route map of Bath into the MapInfo MapHero competition.

I entered the map into the “Map for Fun” category and was surprised to hear I won first prize, a Microsoft Surface tablet! Pretty chuffed with that since the last competition I won was a colouring in competition at primary school -which is kinda what I did here too.

The map consists of around 1,000 crowd sourced running routes which I scraped from MapMyRun.com. The routes, originally in KML format, were converted into MapInfo TAB format and laid on top of the city of Bath boundary which was sourced from Ordnance Survey’s Boundary-Line OpenData.

Ever needed a stylish basemap to display under some map data but have no idea where to look or how to even get it into MapInfo?

Well worry no more, try this:

With the click of a button you can quickly add one of many stylish and freely available basemaps to your map.

The basemaps come from various providers in tile format which with a bit of MapBasic can be converted into TAB files. I have selected a few of my favourites from this rather large list of basemaps and added them to a handy toolbar menu.
The menu is based on the excellent dynamic XML menu example by James Moloney. This means you, the user, can easily add or remove basemaps from the menu by editing a simple XML file.

Usage:

Download, extract the zip file and run the MBX in MapInfo 10.5 or above.
You’ll now have a ‘Basemaps’ option on the toolbar, so get clicking!

The only thing you need to be aware of is there must be a folder called ‘TABs’ in the same directory as the MBX. This is where the TAB files are created so will fail if it doesn’t exist. You can take copies of or move these TABs and they will still work without this basemaps tool.

To add or remove basemaps from the menu, edit Basemaps.xml and then re-run the tool. Hopefully the structure is self explanatory.
You can find all the values you need as well as seeing a preview of each basemap here.

Any issues, leave a comment below.

Licensing:

The tool is released under the GNU GPL license so is free to copy, modify or distribute however you please.
All basemaps are free to use and should already include all the correct attribution for use in MapInfo. Please check with the individual providers if you plan to print or distribute the maps to ensure you’re not in breach of their licensing agreements.
HERE and Esri maps require registration to use, please see here for more info.

Download:

Due to changes in MapInfo 12.5, there are now 2 versions of the tool:
[wpdm_package id=’190′]Includes sourcecode, compiled MBX (v9.5) and config XML file.

Known issues / limitations:

– Tile Server support was added in v10.5 of MapInfo. Therefore, while the tool may run in older versions, you will not be able to open any of the basemaps/TAB files.

– Some basemaps at certain zoom levels are pixelated. This is related to the tile height setting, the size of the MapInfo map window and the particular basemap you are using. You can modify the tile height setting in the sourcecode and recompile but I found ‘230’ seemed to give ok results for most maps. I also noticed resizing the map window seemed to improve the quality too.

– Some basemaps seem to be missing tiles at certain zoom levels. Not much can be done about this besides try a different zoom level or a different basemap.

– Some basemaps give an error at certain zoom levels. This means there are no tiles at this level. Why MapInfo returns an error while for other basemaps it simply displays no basemap, I don’t know.

So you wanna build a GoPro battery grip? Well you’ve come to the right place! Why pay £40 for an off the shelf battery and grip when you can make one yourself with 3x the battery life for less than half the price? You may already have some of the required parts so could work out even cheaper!

All these parts you need can be found on eBay:

I’ve made a video to show you guys how all the parts go together, it’s pretty straight forward.